Newsletters should be letters

Tuesday, September 3, 2024

An advertisement Jason Polan ran in *The New Yorker*

Today’s newsletter makes the case that newsletters should be letters:

People often ask me for advice on how to write a newsletter. I usually tell them some variation of what I wrote in Steal Like an Artist: “Write a newsletter you’d like to read.”

I have a few more tips, like “Pick a repeatable format” or “Be consistent at a regular frequency.”

But my current personal motto is: “Newsletters should be letters.”

What I love most about newsletters is the letter part — the epistle, the missive, the bulletin, the dispatch! What’s going on — in the studio, in my life, in my mind — that’s worth sending out? Worth opening? Worth reading?

I go on to suggest that maybe all writing — books, blogs, etc. — gets better when we just sit down and try to write a letter to the people we’re trying to reach.

“Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. “They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one.”

I ended with a list of suggested letter collections and epistolary novels.

I got a really wonderful batch of responses to this one. MVP reader Sara Bader, editor, quote collector, and author of The Book of Pet Love and Loss, Every Day A Word Surprises Me, and Art is the Highest Form of Hope sent me this marvelous photo of one of her bookshelves full of letter collections. (I have the E.B. White and Tove Jansson unread on my shelves, and I bought that M.F.K Fisher collection for Meg a few years ago.)

A few recommendations that are now on my list:

You can read the whole newsletter here.

Letters mingle souls

Sunday, March 31, 2024

I was making a collage while listening to Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne and found a vintage postage stamp quoting the poet: “Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls, / For thus, friends absent speak.”

I’ve been thinking about this line a lot re: the newsletter. One thing I’ve tried really hard in the past few years to do is to make the newsletter more letter-y. I want each one to feel like a real letter.

Pieces of mail

Sunday, December 6, 2020

It’s bad enough I can’t write back to everyone who writes me, but I feel really weird throwing out nice letters after I read them, so sometimes I’ll open my diary and paste little bits from each piece of mail I read as I go.

A letter from Dr. Sacks

Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Here is one of my prized possessions: a letter from the late, great writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks. He sent it to me in 2014, after seeing my drawing of his book, Musicophilia:

I was thinking this weekend about how much he would’ve liked the documentary My Octopus Teacher. (Note his letterhead above. He loved cephalopods and considered them kindred spirits — they’re smart and they surround themselves with ink! “They called me Inky as a boy,” he wrote in his memoir, On The Move, “and I still seem to get as ink stained as I did seventy years ago.”)

I also rewatched this wonderful video of him showing off his writing desk:

I want company, even if it’s inorganic…I think some of the happiest years of my life were between 10 and 14 when I had a passion for chemistry in general, and metals, in particular. And now, I’ve left my hometown, and my parents are dead, and my brothers are dead, and so much of the past is gone…this rather childlike, chemical bench-like desk appeals to me, gives me some comfort, and makes me feel at home.

I count myself extremely fortunate to possess a letter in his hand. His obituary noted that he received over 10,000 letters a year. He called it an “intercourse with the world,” and said, “I invariably reply to people under 10, over 90 or in prison.” I fit none of those criteria, and I still had the honor.

To my shame, I never wrote back. I had just moved studios and I couldn’t find the drawing and I didn’t want to write back to him until I found it. By the time I did find the drawing I read that he had terminal cancer and I didn’t want to bother him. Just one of my regrets…

Now all I can do is celebrate him by sharing his work and writing back as much as I can. (I look forward to the forthcoming documentary.)

Filed under: Oliver Sacks

Answering letters

Sunday, September 6, 2020

There is no money in answering letters.
—Groucho Marx

I try my best to answer correspondence, but when it comes to email, I feel very much like Donald Knuth:

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.

I’m not interested in being anyone’s boss, so I don’t have an assistant. Everything you see online from me — the newsletter, the blog, etc. — it’s just me. This means I have to make cuts somewhere, and that often means not answering all my email.

Here’s how Neil Gaiman puts it in Make Good Art:

“There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more.”

(My friend Hugh MacLeod put it even more succinctly.)

On the weekends, I get fewer emails, so I try to take an hour or so and get through my paper mail. I usually enjoy answering paper mail more than I enjoy answering email. It’s an excuse to buy lots of stamps and use my typewriter. But it’s even more time-consuming than email, and sometimes I get to it all, sometimes I don’t.

I think the connectivity and access we’ve gained to artists in the digital age has skewed our perspective of what counts as generosity and what doesn’t. Sharing work in itself is an act of generosity. Anything on top of that — teaching, correspondence, etc. — is just another layer.

A commenter on Instagram yesterday noted how disappointing it feels when you take time to write to an artist and the artist has their assistant respond or doesn’t write back at all.

I encourage you to think of it this way:

Do you want the artists you love answering emails or do you want them making the work you love?

Because it’s hard to do both.

(I know which one I prefer.)